Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Leaders can be magnified – or diminished – by the qualities of those around them.

For de Gaulle, politics was not the art of the possible but the art of the willed.

Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution. Along this route, leadership is indispensable: decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed. Within human institutions – states, religions, armies, companie

are endemic or subject to social and political action. Physics has learned that reality is altered by the process of observation. History similarly teaches that men and women shape their environment by their interpretation of it.

‘Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.’[1]

The duties of nations, as he viewed them, were their own justification; oratorical embellishment could only distract from that basic understanding. Adenauer’s unobtrusive style also suggested the role he foresaw for the new Germany in helping to shape a new Europe through consensus.

The historian Andrew Roberts reminds us that, although the most common understanding of ‘leadership’ connotes inherent goodness, leadership ‘is in fact completely morally neutral, as capable of leading mankind to the abyss as to the sunlit uplands. It is a protean force of terrifying power’ that we must strive to orient toward moral ends.[14]

The first transformed Europe from a region where legitimacy was derived from religious faith and dynastic inheritance to an order based on the sovereign equality of secular states and bent on spreading its precepts around the globe. Three centuries later, the Second Thirty Years’ War challenged the entire international system to overcome disillusio

The Soviet Union considered the rebuilding of the West German economy and the progressive establishment of German political institutions as a direct challenge. The communist threat began to eclipse the Western democracies’ fear of a resurgent Germany when, in June 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded the access routes to Berlin from the surrounding Sov